About Me

I am a socio-cultural anthropologist whose current research centers on the politics of foreign aid, democracy promotion, judicial reform, and conflict in Latin America. I received my Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from Brown University (2013), where I studied political and legal anthropology, including anthropological approaches to governance, democracy, dis/order, crime and criminalization, and conflict and its resolution. I spent two years (2013-2015) as a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University, where I also was a faculty affiliate of the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) before moving to Wellesley College.

As an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wellesley College, I offer courses in political anthropology, including anthropological approaches to NGOs, states, and transnational governance; the politics and lived experiences of indigeneity; critical development studies; anthropological approaches to crime and punishment; political ecology; the anthropology of Latin America; and urban anthropology.

My book with Duke University Press, Domesticating Democracy, is based on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in foreign-funded legal aid centers, conflict resolution programs, and the criminal courts in El Alto and La Paz, Bolivia. The book examines how the unfolding (geo)politics of conflict resolution programs have become entangled with Andean kinship practices, regional political tactics, and postcolonial governance projects alike. You can get a 30% discount by entering coupon code E18DEMOC during checkout. The Introduction is available by clicking here.

My ethnographic research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Jacob K. Javits Foundation, and the Tinker Foundation. In 2013, I was awarded Brown University’s Joukowsky Dissertation Prize in Social Science. I also received the 2013 Elsa Cheney Award from the Gender and Feminist Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) for my chapter, “The Conflictual Social Life of an Industrial Sewing Machine.”

Read along with me and my colleagues at “What Wellesley’s Reading” on iTunes U by clicking here. I discuss Audra Simpson’s book Mohawk Interruptus. Adam Van Arsdale introduces To Know Where He Lies, and Deborah Matzner reads from Backstories, among many others…